as with their
perfect fitting, the fate and the pain and the payment of others stood
together in a great grim order. Everything there then was _his_--to
make him ask what had been Nan's, poor Nan's of the constant question
of whether he need have collapsed. She was before him, she was between
them, his little dead dissatisfied wife; across all whose final woe and
whose lowly grave he was to reach out, it appeared, to take gifts. He
saw them too, the gifts; saw them--she bristled with them--in his actual
companion's brave and sincere and authoritative figure, her strangest of
demonstrations. But the other appearance was intenser, as if their ghost
had waved wild arms; so that half a minute hadn't passed before the one
poor thing that remained of Nan, and that yet thus became a quite
mighty and momentous poor thing, was sitting on his lips as for its sole
opportunity.

"Can you give me your word of honour that I mightn't, under decent
advice, have defied you?"

It made her turn very white; but now that she had said what she _had_
said she could still hold up her head. "Certainly you might have defied
me, Herbert Dodd."

"They would have told me you had no legal case?"

Well, if she was pale she was bold. "You talk of decent advice--!" She
broke off, there was too much to say, and all needless. What she said
instead was: "They would have told you I had nothing."

"I didn't so much as ask," her sad visitor remarked.

"Of course you didn't so much as ask."

"I couldn't be so outrageously vulgar," he went on.

"_I_ could, by God's help!" said Kate Cookham.

"Thank you." He had found at his command a tone that made him feel more
gentlemanlike than he had ever felt in his life or should doubtless ever
feel again. It might have been enough--but somehow as they stood there
with this immense clearance between them it wasn't. The clearance was
like a sudden gap or great bleak opening through which there blew upon
them a deadly chill. Too many things had fallen away, too many new
rolled up and over him, and they made something within shake him to his
base. It upset the full vessel, and though she kept her eyes on him
he let that consequence come, bursting into tears, weakly crying there
before her even as he had cried to himself in the hour of his youth when
she had made him groundlessly fear. She turned away then--_that_ she
couldn't watch, and had presently flung herself on the sofa and, all
responsively wailing, buried